A. Beginning with the years 1844-45, when his views took
shape, Marx was a materialist and especially a follower of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose weak
point he subsequently saw only in his materialism being insufficiently consistent and
comprehensive. To Marx, Feuerbach's historic and "epoch-making" significance lay
in his having resolutely broken with Hegel's idealism and in his proclamation of
materialism, which already "in the 18th century, particularly French materialism, was
not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against... religion
and theology, but also... against all metaphysics" (in the sense of "drunken
speculation" as distinct from "sober philosophy"). (The Holy Family,
in Literarischer Nachlass)

"To Hegel... ," wrote Marx, "the process of thinking,
which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is
the demiurgos (the creator, the maker) of the real world.... With me, on the contrary, the
ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated
into forms of thought." (Capital, Vol. I, Afterward to the Second Edition.)
In full conformity with this materialist philosophy of Marx's, and expounding it,
Frederick Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring (read by Marx in the manuscript):

"The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this
is proved... by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science....

"Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never anywhere has there
been matter without motion, or motion without matter, nor can there be.... Bit if the...
question is raised: what thought and consciousness really are, and where they come from;
it becomes apparent that they are products of the human brain and that main himself is a
product of Nature, which has developed in and along with its environment; hence it is
self-evident that the products of the human brain, being in the last analysis also
products of Nature, do not contradict the rest of Nature's interconnections but are in
correspondence with them....

"Hegel was an idealist, that is to say, the thoughts within his mind
were to him not the more or less abstract images [Abbilder, reflections; Engels
sometimes speaks of "imprints"] of real things and processes, but on the
contrary, things and their development were to him only the images, made real, of the
'Idea' existing somewhere or other before the world existed."

In his Ludwig Feuerbach -- which expounded his own and Marx's views on
Feuerbach's philosophy, and was sent to the printers after he had re-read an old
manuscript Marx and himself had written in 1844-45 on Hegel, Feuerbach and the materialist
conception of history -- Engels wrote:

"The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more
recent philosophy, is the relation of thinking and being... spirit to Nature... which is
primary, spirit or Nature.... The answers which the philosophers gave to this question
split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primary of spirit to Nature and,
therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other... comprised
the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded Nature as primary, belonged to the various
schools of materialism."

Any other use of the concepts of (philosophical) idealism and materialism leads only to
confusion. Marx decidedly rejected, not only idealism, which is always linked in one way
or another with religion, but also the views -- especially widespread in our day -- of
Hume and Kant, agnosticism, criticism, and positivism in their various forms; he
considered that philosophy a "reactionary" concession to idealism, and at best a
"shame-faced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before
the world." On this question, see, besides the works by
Engels and Marx mentioned above, a letter Marx wrote to Engels on December 12, 1868, in
which, referring to an utterance by the naturalist Thomas Huxley, which was "more
materialistic" than usual,, and to his recognition that "as long as we actually
observe and think, we cannot possibly get away from materialism", Marx reproached
Huxley for leaving a "loop hole" for agnosticism, for Humism.

It is particularly important to note Marx's view on the relation between freedom and
necessity: "Freedom is the appreciation of necessity. 'Necessity is blind only
insofar as it is not understood.'" (Engels in Anti-Duhring) This means
recognition of the rule of objective laws in Nature and of the dialectical transformation
of necessity into freedom (in the same manner as the transformation of the uncognized but
cognizable "thing-in-itself" into the "thing-for-us", of the
"essence of things" into "phenomena). Marx and Engels considered that the
"old" materialism, including that of Feuerbach (and still more the
"vulgar" materialism of Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott), contained the following
major shortcomings:

This materialism was "predominantly mechanical," failing to take
account of the latest developments in chemistry and biology (today it would be necessary
to add: and in the electrical theory of matter);

The old materialism was non-historical and non-dialectical (metaphysical,
in the meaning of anti-dialectical), and did not adhere consistently and comprehensively
to the standpoint of development;

It regarded the "human essence" in the abstract, not as the
"complex of all" (concretely and historically determined) "social
relations", and therefore morely "interpreted" the world, whereas it was a
question of "changing" it, i.e., it did not understand the importance of
"revolutionary practical activity".

A. As the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of
development, and the richest in content, Hegelian dialectics was considered by Marx and
Engels the greatest achievement of classical German philosophy. They thought that any
other formulation of the principle of development, of evolution, was one-sided and poor in
content, and could only distort and mutilate the actual course of development (which often
proceeds by leaps, and via catastrophes and revolutions) in Nature and in society.

"Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious
dialectics [from the destruction of idealism, including Hegelianism] and apply it in the
materialist conception of Nature.... Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be
said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written
before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily
increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature's
process is dialectical and not metaphysical.

"The great basic thought," Engels writes, "that the world is not to be
comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which
the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go
through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away... this great
fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated
ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But
to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to
each domain of investigation are two different things.... For dialectical philosophy
nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and
in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming
and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical
philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking
brain." Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is "the science of the general laws
of motion, both of the external world and of human though."

This revolutionary aspect of Hegel's philosophy was adopted and developed by Marx.
Dialectical materialism "does not need any philosophy standing above the other
sciences." From previous philosophy there remains "the science of thought and
its laws -- formal logic and dialectics." Dialectics, as
understood by Marx, and also in conformity with Hegel, includes what is now called the
theory of knowledge, or epistemology, studying and generalizing the original and
development of knowledge, the transition from non-knowledge to knowledge.

In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated
social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this
idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegels' philosophy, is far more
comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A
development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats
them in a different way, on a higher basis ("the negation of the negation"), a
development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development
by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; "breaks in continuity"; the
transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by
the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given
body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society; the interdependence and the
closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon
(history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and
universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws -- these are some of the
features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional
one. (See Marx's letter to Engels of January 8, 1868, in which he ridicules Stein's
"wooden trichotomies," which it would be absurd to confuse with materialist
dialectics.)

A. The basis of alienation under capitalism is the alienation
of the worker from the product of his labour and the mystification of
capitalist exploitation that tries to hide the real relation between
wage labour and capital. Out of this hidden exploitation arises the
fetishism of commodities whereby things (commodities) take on the
attributes of living beings and humans are degraded to the level of
"things". These distorted, mystified ("alienated") relations sink deep
into human consciousness and are then regarded as something natural and
inevitable. Thus, in the English language, workers are referred to as
"hands", wa we often refer to a man as being "worth a billion dollars".
But the basis of this alienation is to be found in the relations of
production and in property relations, which is merely a legal
expression for the same thing. This is explained in the very profound
and dialectical chapter in the first volume of Capital "On the
Fetishism of commodities, and the Secret Thereof".

A. Many people wonder whether the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre,
existentialism, phenomenology, the "New Left", post-structuralism and
post-modernism are somehow compatible with Marx's thinking. These
trends represent a petit-bourgeois attempt to find interpretations of
the world that are different to Marxism. That is their common
denominator and raison d'être. They proceed from entirely different
premises and therefore cannot be made compatible with Marxism.

Marx started out with a study of the history of philosophy. In
attempting to understand the development of philosophy and what it
represented he came to the conclusion that the development of the means
of production was ultimately the key to understanding the development
of society. Does this mean that the causal relation between the
development of the productive forces is direct and automatic? If that
were the case, our task would be redundant because revolution would be
unnecessary. The whole point is that the process is dialectical,
involving a contradiction between the demands of economic development
and the inevitable lag in human consciousness, ideas, theories,
institutions, morality, etc. However, yes, in the final analysis, the
development of the productive forces is decisive. Deny that and you
will end in a mess.

These petit-bourgeois thinkers move in the opposite direction. They
move away from the economic base and end up with "individualism". They
refute the class approach to understanding society precisely because it
comes into conflict with their own individualistic way of thinking.
These ladies and gentlemen spend all their lives in aimless
"theoretical" meanderings which never come close to the real movement
of society and the working class. Shut up in their university
hot-houses, they are free to indulge themselves in politics as a hobby.

The decay of capitalism also affects the field of ideology and culture.
Philosophy in our time has entered into a phase of irreversible
decline. In all the trends of modern Western philosophy, one looks in
vain for a single idea that has not been expressed long ago, and far
better by others. Bourgeois philosophy has withered on the vine. It has
nothing new or meaningful to say. For that very reason, it is justly
subject to universal contempt, or, more accurately, indifference. Here
again the baneful effects of the extreme division of labour make
themselves felt with a vengeance. Isolated in their ivory towers, the
academics pass their lives writing obscure theses which are read, and
sometimes answered, by other academics. Few people understand what they
write. Fewer still even care!

Let us take Existentialism. This is one of the emptiest of the modern
bourgeois "philosophies" (it goes against the grain to dignify it with
the name). Existentialism has its roots in the irrationalist trend of
19th century philosophy, typified by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It has
assumed the most varied forms and political colouring. There was a
religious trend (Marcel, Jaspers, Berdyayev and Buber) and an atheistic
trend (Heidigger, Sartre, Camus). But its most common feature is
extreme subjectivism, reflected in its preferred vocabulary: its
watchwords - "being-in-the-world", "dread", "care", "being towards
death", and the like. It was already anticipated by Edmund Husserl, a
German mathematician turned philosopher, whose "phenomenology" was a
form of subjective idealism, based on the "individual, personal world,
as directly experienced, with the ego at the centre".

Existentialism centres everything on the moment. All that you can
achieve is in the moment in which you are living and anything before or
after becomes irrelevant. It is an individualistic and extremely
pessimistic view of the world, entirely at one with the psychology of
the petty bourgeois intellectual. This is the very opposite of Marxism
and inevitably leads you away from a class understanding. Thus it
becomes irrelevant to study the past, to study overall processes. You
must live for the moment and for yourself. This school of thought
developed on the basis of the petit-bourgeois of the 1930s, ruined by
the economic crisis and crushed between the working class and the big
banks and monopolies. Politically and personally disoriented, and
lacking any perspective, they had lost any hope in the future. One
group of existentialists collaborated with the Nazis (Heidigger) while
another for a time came within the orbit of Stalinism (Sartre). In
neither case did they lose their essentially petty bourgeois idealist
character.

With existentialism, we reach the complete dissolution of modern
philosophy. It may be argued (probably correctly) that this world view
reflects the irrationalism of the capitalist system in its period of
senile decay. It would not be difficult to demonstrate that in every
period of decline similar philosophical trends have emerged. They
reflect the pessimism of the intellectual who, having a fairly
comfortable life, is able to turn his back on society and seek
salvation in the "dark night of the soul".

Jean-Paul Sartre made an attempt to unite existentialism with
"Marxism" (actually, Stalinism) and met with predictable results. One
cannot unite oil and water. Sartre's thought cannot be described as a
coherent body of philosophical ideas. It is a disorderly mishmash of
notions borrowed from different philosophers, particularly Descartes
and Hegel. The end result is total incoherence, shot through with a
pervading spirit of pessimism and nihilism. For Sartre, the fundamental
philosophical experience is nausea, a feeling of disgust at the absurd
and incomprehensible nature of being. Everything is resolved into
nothingness. This is a caricature of Hegel, who certainly did not think
that the world was incomprehensible. In Sartre's writings, Hegelian
jargon is used in a way that makes even Hegel's most obscure passages
seem models of clarity.

Jean-Paul Sartre represented the "left" wing of existentialism, as
opposed to the openly fascist wing. That is to his credit. But he never
broke with the mystical idealist basis of existentialism, dwelling on
"Being and the threat of Nothingness", "Freedom of Choice", "Duty", and
so on. A sense of impending doom, and a feeling of powerlessness and
"dread" fill these writings, accompanied by an attempt to seek an
alternative on an individual basis. This expressed a certain mood among
section of the intellectuals after the first world war in Germany, and
then in France. What it indicates is the profound crisis of liberalism,
as a result of "the Great War", and the upheavals which followed in its
wake. They saw the problems facing society, but could see no
alternative.

Underlying all this is the feeling of impotence of the isolated
intellectual, faced with a hostile and uncomprehending world. In other
words, the usual outlook of the petty bourgeois intellectual. The
attempt to escape from the wicked world into individualism is summed up
in Sartre's celebrated (or notorious) phrase: "L'enfer, c'est les
autres" ("Hell is other people"). How this outlook could ever be
squared with the revolutionary optimism of dialectical materialism it
is hard to imagine. But then, no-one could ever accuse Sartre of
consistency. It is, of course, to his credit that he espoused
progressive causes, like Vietnam and solidarized with the movement of
the French workers and students in 1968. But from a philosophical and
psychological point of view, the position of Sartre was completely
foreign to Marxism.

A. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas; i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time
its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its
disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that
thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production
are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas;
hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore the ideas of
its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things
consciousness, and therefore think. In so far, therefore, as they rule as a class and
determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in
their whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas,
and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age; thus their ideas
are the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology -
1846)